Yash Chopra and the alchemy of romance

This essay is not a film review. A review of Jab Tak Hai Jaan (JTHJ) would be mundane, even harsh. This essay is a tribute to a man, Yash Chopra, and the worlds of romance he chose to construct. This film is like a last testament, an enactment of the rhythms that made romance possible, Yash Chopra style. He has a perfect duo to accompany him, the music of A.R. Rahman and the lyrics of Gulzar. The plot or story is what actors enact and is sometimes secondary.
There is something about Indian romance that is never simple. Boy cannot meet girl and live happily ever after. Such a plot is too simple and would not be Indian. An Indian romance needs a triangle and the third part of every triangle is society. Society is not just the difficult mother, the patriarchal father, the boyfriend hovering from the past; the political economy of the middle class for society is the past, the repressions, the baggage we carry within. An Indian romance can never be quiet. It needs time, sacrifice, the unravelling of social norms like responsibility, care, family, sacrifice. If these virtues and values do not come into play, the romance does not work. It needs time, pain, memory, complexity, accident, luck, fate to create the alchemy called romance.
Take Veer-Zaara: it is not only a love story between a Pakistani and an Indian, an Indian soldier and a Pakistani civilian; it is the love story of India and Pakistan enacted between two individuals. It is this staging of levels that made a Yash Chopra movie so profound. Think of Deewar where romance is
complicated by a man losing his mother because he is a lost criminal. In pining for his mother he pines for that lost security where brothers have lost each other, where families are split, where love waits for the dualisms of our society to embrace each other. In some ways JTHJ is a Veer-Zaara enacted not across borders but across different avatars of the same person.
JTHJ is a love story told thrice where a young Indian falls in love with a rich girl and loses her. In the second he meets another girl and enacts a different version of the silence and muteness of love. The hero then encounters his old love again. Of course such a script needs modern medicine to help it. The favourite diseases of Indian film have been tuberculosis, the core of socialist realism, heart attack, the dread of cancer, which created classics like Anand, and retrograde amnesia which lets you play with time and people. A doctor creates the possibility of psychotherapy without invoking the language of libidinal psychiatry. This convinces you that sacrificing women and mute lovers cannot be repressed. They are merely dormant people for whom time willingly incarnates itself. All you need is the belief that time will redeem romance. In modern times, you also need to script cities like London, as Shah Rukh confesses, “This city keeps getting younger as I age
quietly.”
JTHJ is a meditation on two generations of love played by Anushka Sharma playing herself and Katrina Kaif being herself. There is a difference. Anushka plays a social type, a bubbly young girl ready for the world who discovers
sex before she encounters love, and then
confesses that the present has been unfair because they don’t have males like Maj. Samar Anand.
The other incarnation of love is Katrina. There is something heavy, placid about her, a sense that she comes alive only through dance, but even her jhatkas are not strong enough to break the weight of internalised society. Katrina is so placid, so utterly ageless that one realises why romance takes so long. One can fall in love at the age of 10 and be redeemed at 60.
There is another message in the film. It is clear that the dissident like the renouncer is outside the society, someone erased, forgotten or an outcast who reappears more like a dream. When Katrina’s mother disappears, she is forgotten only to reappear years later to explain that a society was not ready for a woman who leaves her husband for another man. The individualistic romance where love sustains two people without the baggage of history, society, tradition is something we are not ready for. A love story which involves only two people is an Indian oxymoron.
In that sense Anushka’s role is a new sociological statement of a new generation which is more confident of itself, more mobile and nubile, which can terminate an affair at the press of a phone button and yet longs for something deeper. Yash Chopra shows that there is a hidden power here, a zest for idealism or adventure, of sport, that can be normatively creative. This is a generation that is ready to talk about itself, that is incapable of using muteness and silence to hide pain and is also less hypocritical and more impatient about senseless sacrifice.
As one survives this multi-layered film, one senses Yash Chopra reiterating his view of life, his yen for romance yet contending that while an Indian cannot abandon sacrifice, as its basic covenant, one can have variants within the theme. It is the woman who articulate this possibility whether in Silsila, Veer-Zaara or JTHJ. The men are frozen in their stock selves. The masculine patriarchal virus is too deep in the Indian male for change to colonise him.
It is the tacit messages that make the film. Yash Chopra creates a stock of stereotypes and then proves Indian romance in all its variation exists in the repertoire of stereotype. One enjoys the film and leaves wondering when a film with a real difference will emerge.

The writer is a social science nomad